The definitive story of the saga in the Philippines and South America was provided by J. A. Miller in Human Life International Reports. “During the early 1990s, the World Health Organization has been overseeing massive vaccination campaigns against tetanus in . . . Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Phillipines,” he writes in 1995. HLI has 60 world affiliates, and one day received a report from their Mexican affiliate workers who observed some highly suspicious procedures. Why women and no men? Why multiple booster shots? HLI “obtained several vials of the vaccine and had them analyzed by chemists,” says Miller. “Some of the vials were found to contain human chorionic gonodotrophin (HCG).”
HCG is produced by an expecting woman which allows her to provide nutrients to a fertilized egg when the tiny baby attaches to the uterine lining. A positive result of pregnancy is determined when a pregnancy test detects HCG. But when a woman is injected with HCG mixed with the tetanus vaccine toxins, the woman’s body also identifies HCG as toxic and does not secrete it. So future fertilized eggs do not get the nutrients they need and the new life dies. Thus, her pregnancies are terminated immediately.
Miller says Human Life International then warned its worldwide affiliates of the issue. “Soon additional reports of vaccines laced with HCG hormones began to drift in from the Philippines, where more than 3.4 million women were recently vaccinated. Similar reports came from Nicaragua.” 7
It’s all in the details. Did the vaccine actually have HCG? Snopes provides some reasons besides UN denials to argue against it. Citing the organization Reproductive Health Matters (changed recently to “Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters” to highlight their “gender diversity” efforts), they allege Catholic workers discovered the presence of HCG using pregnancy kits, which do not work for testing a vaccine. The test requires laboratory technology. When six labs tested the vaccine “the results clearly showed that the vaccines did not contain HCG.” 8
Miller and HLI tell a different story: “Confronted with the results of laboratory tests which detected its presence in three of the four vials of tetanus toxoid examined, the World Health Organization and the Department of Health scoffed at the evidence coming from ‘right-to-life and Catholic’ sources. Four new vials of the tetanus vaccine were submitted by DOH to St. Luke’s (Lutheran) Medical Center in Manila—and all four vials tested positive for HCG.”
Snopes again quotes Reproductive Health Matters: “The low levels of HCG like activity seen in some places were the result of false positive reactions.” According to UNICEF, any trace of HCG would be “an extremely rare contamination.”
Miller said the argument changed from outright denial to “insignificant” amounts of HCG and “false positives,” which means contamination derived from the manufacturing process. Another 30 women were tested in the Philippines after being vaccinated and “twenty-six tested positive for high levels of anti-HCG,” he wrote. “The WHO and the DOH had no answers.” 9
Regarding Dr. Ngare’s charges of sterilization attempts in those countries as well as Kenya more recently, Snopes called it “conspiracy theory.” But perhaps the dog-loving Ngare can be forgiven for entertaining conspiracy theories when only a year before the tetanus scandal in Kenya, it was revealed that 130,000 Ethiopians living in Israel were subjected to similar forced contraceptive practices.
Forbes magazine discussed the global headlines that said “a report revealing African women immigrating to Israel were subjected to mandatory contraceptive injections, effectively amounting to forced (if temporary) sterilization . . .” The Israeli Ethiopian immigrant population has historically been poor, but healthy and growing, although the birthrate decreased 20 percent in the past decade. “Advocacy groups now claim this decline is the result of a birth control program forced upon Ethiopian immigrant women.”
“Israel has acknowledged the issue (without admitting any wrongdoing),” said Forbes, “and has vowed institutional changes in healthcare for immigrants.” The prestigious financial magazine adds: “There is no excuse for depriving women sovereignty over their own reproductive choices.” Forbes calls the development “shocking.” While saying it is not comparable in scale to Jews’ past sufferings, Forbes also says: “Israel’s implicit intent to limit ‘burdensome’ (read: undesirable) portions of the population recalls the dark eugenics experiments of World War II.” 10
But what about the actual science in Kenya? Do the vaccines contain HCG? Have the tests been done? What does Snopes, dedicated to just the facts and not bias, or perspective or worldview or opinion, tell us about the laboratories and the testing?
Before wading into that controversy, let us mention here that Dr. Ngare’s call for a boycott extended beyond tetanus. He and the bishops warned against the polio vaccine, the holy grail of all vaccinations.
“Africa will mark one year without polio on Tuesday,” reported NPR. “But last week . . . [Kenya’s] Catholic bishops declared a boycott of the World Health Organization’s [polio] vaccination campaign, saying they needed to ‘test’ whether ingredients contain a derivative of estrogen. Dr. Wahome Ngare of the Kenyan Doctor’s Catholic Doctor’s Association alleged that the presence of the female hormone could sterilize children.”
Oddly, NPR made no mention of the blazing tetanus vaccine controversy occurring around the same time, a campaign losing steam due to the Catholic boycott. Dr. Ngare’s suspicion was raised “by WHO’s decision to blanket Kenya with polio vaccines, well over and above routine injections,” reported NPR. “The WHO says there’s no harm in giving extra vaccines to children who are already vaccinated.”
In fairness, NPR represents Ngare as pro-vaccine in general: “He administers vaccines to his patients in his clinic. His children are vaccinated. ‘Regular immunizations are safe and they must continue,’ he says. ‘You must immunize your child.’”
“He raises the specter of eugenics—sterilizing segments of human populations,” writes NPR’s reporter, Gregory Warner. “He put forth other objections as well: ‘There are all sorts of stories out there,’ he told me. ‘Vaccines can cause autism. Vaccines have been used for spread of HIV. There are some cancer-causing viruses that you’d find in vaccines. So there are a lot of stories. Some of them we don’t know whether they’re true or not.’”
Says the reporter Warner: “I pointed out to him that research has shown that claims of vaccines being linked to autism and HIV and cancer are in fact not true. His response: ‘We could debate this forever.’” 11
Once again, Ngare is being positioned, rightly or wrongly, as a “conspiracy theorist.” And now he and the bishops are calling off vaccinations of polio, considered by far the most effective of all vaccines, created by the most famous of all vaccination doctors, Jonas Salk. Take your choice, the famous inventor who made the cover of Time Magazine—the “Father of Vaccines,” or an unknown whistleblower in Africa? Dr. Ngare can perhaps be forgiven for his conspiracies regarding the polio vaccine if we consider Jonas Salk’s own words. Cultural critic Jay Dyer’s review of a book by Salk revealed that the Father of Vaccines suggests the possibility of injecting harmful viruses into humans, specifically reproductive organs. Salk writes: “’Mutations’ as here defined, would also be produced by the introduction, either naturally or experimentally, of a virus into a sperm or egg cell, the genetic information of which would then be incorporated in either the DNA or the RNA and transmitted. Such new information might be advantageous or disadvantageous.” 12
Salk writes this in pages 43 of his book with the very eugenic sounding title: The Survival of the Wisest. Who gets to receive Salk’s negative viruses? He doesn’t say. He does note in the same short book that “relativistic” thinking is better than “anti-evolutionary” value judgments—so he may not care for the Catholics. “Absolutists are extremists who see life exclusively from their own narrow, rigid viewpoint” and “may be destroyed by their own inability to participate in the evolutionary process.” If you “resist evolution” it leads to “nonsurvival and nonexistence.”
“When we speak of the survival of the wisest,” he concludes, “by wisest we mean those who comprehend the survival-evolutionary process, as well as the being becoming process, and who make choices such as enhance the possibility of existence rather than nonexistence, recognizing evolution as an essential and inexorable continuum of growth and development.” 13
He may have been a great scientist, I don’t know. But he was an awful writer—albeit a frightening one. His book is another difficult one to find. I traveled a few hours to see one firsthand.
Regarding the actual testing of the tetanus vaccine in Kenya, the process started with the bishops, the doctors association, and Dr. Ngare sending six samples for testing in South Africa. Their joint statement stated that the vaccine is “laced with the Beta-HCG hormone.”
The largest catholic doctors organization in the world, Matercare, based in Canada, backed Ngare and the bishops, calling the vaccination program “evil,” according to Matercare’s Harvard educated founder Dr. Robert Walley. The Washington Post printed this important endorsement of Ngare. 14
Snopes cited UNICEF for their refutation, saying the analyzers used were for blood and urine, not for a vaccine. But Ngare maintained that a retest was difficult, as the first test required surreptitiously obtaining samples by devout Catholics at the hospital. He said this vaccine is lacking “the usual fanfare of government publicity” and instead “only a few operatives from the government are allowed to give it out. They come with a police escort.”
To resolve the mistrust, both the Catholic doctors and the government’s health department agreed to do a second test by a joint committee of Catholic, government, and independent medical experts. But the results were again debated. Dr. Stephen Karanja, an official with Ngare for the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, submitted to the committee the new findings of HCG in the vaccine, calling it “nothing short of a scheme to forcefully render women incapable of bearing children.” Conversely, the Health Ministry submitted its test results to the committee, showing no trace of HCG. 15
A leader of the committee lamented, “We are at loss about who to believe since both sides have tabled conflicting results.” However, the Matercare founder felt like he had seen enough evidence to switch sides. “The bishops did the responsible thing in raising concerns,” Dr. Walley said. “But I have checked with experts in Australia and America and confirmed the information the Catholic doctors put out was not right.”
For Kenya’s new joint committee, six laboratories ran results. One lab, Lancet Kenya, run by Dr. Ahmed Kalebi, found no HCG. “I’ve checked results from the other 5 labs and these give very consistent findings to what we have,” he said, “except for 2 samples . . . at Pathcare.” So once again, the methods of the testing were questioned. Dr. Ngare said the second tests “raise suspicion that the vaccine is laced with HCG, more so the results of Pathcare that were way above the lab cut-off.” 16
Therefore, all parties called for a third round of testing. Meanwhile, the secretary general of the teacher’s union of Kenya called for a boycott of the tetanus vaccine. “A generation will come when we will not have children to teach,” he said. “We will, therefore, end up with no jobs.” 17
The Washington Post reported that the Kenya Parliament itself moved to oversee the third test of the vaccine. The Post asked if “the bishops’ accusations will hold up to continued scrutiny?” But they also in the same breath alluded to the eugenics skeleton in America’s past. “Forced, involuntary sterilization—particularly targeting certain groups, such as the poor, the mentally ill or the HIV positive—has a long and shameful history, including in the United States.” 18
LifeSiteNews reported that the tests commissioned by the Kenyan Parliament—the third round of tests—brought results of 3 of 59 vials of vaccine samples containing the HCG hormone. “Local news media . . . reported this as if it resolved the controversial issue [but] the Kenyan Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a 19-point statement questioning the test claims,” and insisted no more vaccines be administered until they are proven safe.
The formal statement, signed by the chairman of the conference, Cardinal John Njue, said none of the samples came from the early campaign, where HCG was first detected, thereby giving WHO an opportunity to change the later vaccine samples. They also contended that the third test was to involve equal amounts of samples from the government and the bishops. Of the bishops’ 9 samples, three contained HCG. When the government saw the results, they added 40 more vials to the samples and delayed the committee’s report one week to include the extra findings. 19
Once again, the two groups were at an impasse. Then, Dr. Ngare and his colleague, Dr. Karanja, were both summoned to appear before the Preliminary Inquiry Committee of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, which determines licensure. Also, one of the labs that detected HCG in the third round of testing, Aqriq-Quest Ltd, was stripped of its accreditation. Business Daily Africa reported that a former employee, who requested anonymity, claimed that “the lab lacked capacity to carry out the tests it was handling for its clients.” Agriq-Quest, according to Snopes, claimed the government had withheld a large sum for their lab services due to their “refusal to doctor results in favor” of the Ministry of Health. Snopes said “no evidence has been offered to suggest that narrative was anything other than a desperate PR move by a business whose accreditation had been revoked.” 20
Health Impact News interviewed a spokesman for Agriq-Quest, which has a headquarters in the Netherlands as well as Kenya. Asked if their labs had the necessary equipment for testing HCG: “Yes, the method of choice was HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography). We have three HPLC machines and we developed and validated the method.” This same spokesman said 3 of 6 vials tested had the HCG hormone. “We reported our preliminary findings to the joint committee. The committee was disbanded before the final report was presented.”
“Our license was not suspended. We continue to run the laboratory,” the Agriq-Quest spokesman added, saying the news about licensing had to do with “soil and wastewater” issues of a local concern, not the lab. “They suspended the accreditation which we know was due to other influence and we decided to we did not require it anymore and withdrew from it.”
“We feel we were right in our analysis and that the vaccines were contaminated with beta HCG,” the spokesman continued. “No kind of intimidation will hide this and take this scientific fact away. What happened was a systematic scheme to destroy the credibility of the laboratory and cast doubt on the tests since they did not have the capacity to challenge the science and method used to analyze the vaccines.” Dr. Ngare agrees. “They only withdrew their local accreditation, which is of little consequence to the functionality of the laboratory. It was most likely a preemptive move to put doubt in the results just in case the results are ever published in a scientific paper as we have done.”
Ngare believes the licensure hearing he and his colleague were summoned to appear before was a similar show trial. They were given “a long lecture on the importance of vaccines” but heard nothing further. “My feeling is that the sermons were used to create a certain impression among the public—that we were summoned by the board for disciplinary proceedings [but] we have never spoken thereafter. A very clever political trick, I must admit.” 21
In 2017, three years after the initial controversy, the former prime minister of Kenya, Raila Odinga said, “Today, we can confirm to the country that the Catholic Church was right.” The story was reported by Agence de Presse, (the wire service of France) which added: “According to Odinga, the government, for some mysterious reason, was hell bent on misleading the country, while intentionally sterilizing Kenyan girls and women.”
Ngare assured the media that they will continue to test vaccinations “so that they will not poison our people in the future.” But Matercare’s Dr. Walley continues to believe the fears are groundless, saying his fellow Catholic doctors “got confused, I think, by the reports from Mexico and India about sterilization campaigns.” 22
In fact, two years after the Kenya controversy, India’s Health Department cut all ties with the Gates Foundation regarding vaccinations. The Economic Times reported that officials in India grew alarmed over conflicts of interest problems with Big Pharma and Gates after conducting a study entitled: “Philanthropic Power and Development—Who shapes the agenda?” The study warned of “the growing influence of the large philanthropic foundations, especially the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” Only two years earlier, Bill and Melinda Gates had been given India’s third highest award. “We have always said foreign influence in our domestic policies must be avoided,” said a spokesman for a sovereignty advocacy group in India. 23
For Dr. Ngare and those concerned about vaccine tampering, various tests and presentations of “evidence” from the other side no longer have much staying power. “Why should anyone be surprised,” he said. “They did it in South America.” The Washington Post’s Nov. 14, 2014 article said the matter was “unresolved,” but did give some resolution by pointing to the “online debunking site Snopes, which rated the claim ‘false.’”
Snopes, which updated its report in 2018, has this final word on the Agriq-Quest claims of “foul play” and the Kenya vaccine scandal: “. . . the claim of a government’s mandating doctored results to sell a secret sterilization program has not been ignored by conspiracy-minded websites . . .” 24
Snopes, of course, refers to itself not as conspiracy-minded or biased or with any malice towards traditionalists or progressives or any other worldview. They refer to their organization as “scholarly and reliable” and added Facebook as a client. However, two years after their negative assessment of the Catholic bishops and doctors, the Daily Mail released a rather embarrassing article with the long but interesting title: “Facebook ‘fact checker’ who will arbitrate on ‘fake news’ is accused of defrauding website to pay for prostitutes—and its staff includes an escort-porn star and ‘Vice Vixen domme.’”
Snopes founder David Mikkelson found himself on the receiving end of a divorce by cofounder Barbara Mikkelson. Her legal filings, according to the Mail, says he “embezzled $98,000 of company money and spent it on ‘himself and prostitutes.’” His new wife, Elyssa Young, a “long-time escort and porn star,” is on staff at Snopes. The Mail gives quite a few details of her escort web page. “While David Mikkelson has denied that Snopes takes any political position, his new wife has a background in politics,” reports the Mail. She ran for congress and bashed the Republican opponent, handing out “cards and condoms stamped with the slogan ‘Don’t get screwed again’” . . . But she received “a bad spot of media attention after Young misspelled her Republican opponent’s name on her campaign website.”
“One of the lead fact-checkers, Kim LaCapria, has also been a sex-and-fetish blogger who went by the pseudonym ‘Vice Vixen.’” the Daily Mail reported. “She described her blog as a lifestyle website ‘with a specific focus on naughtiness, sin, carnal pursuits, and general hedonism.’” She wrote on her blog that she “has posted on Snopes.com while smoking pot.”
Regarding financial details of the divorce, “David wanted his salary raised from $240,000 to $360,000 – arguing that this would still put him below the ‘industry standards’ and that he should be paid up to $720,000 a year. . . So bitter was the dispute, that they even fell out over the arbiter they had appointed to settle disputes, meaning that Facebook’s arbiter cannot even agree on its own arbiter.” 25
A writer for Forbes balked at Mikkelson’s refusal to comment on the Daily Mail article because of a pending lawsuit. “In short, when someone attempted to fact check the fact-checker, the response was the equivalent of ‘it’s secret.’” 26
The two opponents in Kenya’s vaccination scandal have not been able to reconcile. “They are all my good friends on both sides,” said the Lancet Lab director. “Now they are [denouncing] each other.” 27
Robert Walley, the Harvard trained doctor and founder of Matercare, who has supported both sides at one time or another, ultimately struggled with the idea of United Nations organizations being involved in a conspiracy to hurt others. “The World Health Organization and UNICEF are intensely regulated organizations, mandated to improve the physical and social well-being of women and children throughout the world,” he said. “[They are] therefore unlikely to be involved in giving a contraceptive vaccine disguised as a tetanus vaccine. This would amount to a gross violation of human rights.”
This is generally what the argument comes down to. It is almost impossible to believe that “nice” people would do such bad things. Could certain doctors in their benign white jackets perform such dark deeds? What about UN workers called to help the helpless? It doesn’t seem possible. What about the billionaire philanthropists whose friendly faces we see on a regular basis? To believe the HCG laced vaccine story is to open the door to believing other possibilities of sinister actions taken by people with a tremendous amount of respect and an enormous amount of power.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat feels your pain. “It’s easy for us to look back and pass judgment on yesterday’s eugenicists. It’s harder to acknowledge what we have in common with them,” he writes, naming “a desire for mastery and control” and “a belief in our own fundamental goodness, no matter to what end our mastery is turned.”
“The American elite’s pre-World War II commitment to breeding out the ‘unfit’ — defined variously as racial minorities, low-I.Q. whites, [etc] — is a story that defies easy stereotypes about progress and enlightenment,” Douthat notes, “But these same eugenicists were often political and social liberals — advocates of social reform, partisans of science . . .” He quotes from the recent Yale Alumni Magazine attempting to come to terms with a well-known eugenicist alum: “They weren’t sinister characters out of some darkly lighted noir film about Nazi sympathizers,” the writer explains, “but environmentalists, peace activists, fitness buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts, inventors and family men.”
The New York Times columnist continues: “From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, fears about ‘race suicide’ and ‘human weeds’ were common among self-conscious progressives, who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their broader dream of human advancement.” He provides a final foreboding comment: “. . . the elimination or pre-emption, through careful reproductive planning, of the weaker members of the human species — has become a more realistic possibility than it ever was in the 1920s and ’30s.” 28
Douthat encourages us not to look on the mere surface: science types, sustainability activists, heath advocates, wonderful family people—none of those should keep us from asking the difficult questions. We should examine the facts and the documentation and draw our own conclusions.
